The giant cat was removed from his Harlem apartment and spent the last 15 years at an animal sanctuary in Ohio.
15 years ago Ming, a grown up tiger, was held as a pet in a tiny project apartment in the projects called Drew Hamilton in Harlem, New York.
15 years ago Ming injured his owner Antione Yates and was brought to a sanctuary in Ohio, where he died of natural causes.
This already happened in February but news about it was just released.
The Harlem Guy who Raises Ming name is Antione Yates was sadden by his dead and had this to say about the cat:
“He would literally lay right across me and wouldn’t fall asleep unless his body was sprawled across mine,” on a mattress on the floor of his five-bedroom NYCHA apartment,” Yates remembered in a recent phone call.
Yates had purchased Ming at age six weeks from a wild-animal dealer , starting him on a bottle, then on pureed meat lovingly spooned from Gerber baby food jars, then on chickens, liver and bones from the supermarket, from which, by 2003, he was lugging home about 20 pounds of big-cat food a day.
On the day Ming turned on him, Yates had tried to step between the tiger and a small black cat, named “Shadow,” that he’d taken in as a rescue, but which had escaped from its closed bedroom.
“When they say I got mauled, that’s not true,” he insisted. “He was just trying to get me out of the way.”
It was while Yates was hospitalized for what he claimed, unconvincingly, was a “pitbull bite,” that his neighbors finally told or snitched on him.
Yates says he wish he could had seen Ming again and said his good byes to the Tiger he helped raised
